We are Back, and Better than Ever

After a couple of days of near-death, which followed a week or two of crawling speeds, following about a year of general sluggishness due to high traffic, the MMM blog has finally been massively upgraded to a completely new and very speedy web server. Whereas loading the main page used to be sort of a “whirrr..clunk..clunk..hmppphlzzz..plop” experience, as I test it today, it is decidedly more “Vssshhhhhh…BANG!!”

While I’m excited at the time savings this brings to my own daily life, I’m even more excited for how much time it will save YOU. If you multiply our 2.3 million pageviews in the past month by the average of 3 seconds of loading time the new server should eliminate, you get 1916 hours per month or about 80 days of people’s lives which are no longer wasted, every month. If we value your time at $40 per hour, this server upgrade is saving about $76,640 of the readers’ collective time every month. And yet the upgrade is costing me considerably less than that. So I apologize for not getting this done sooner!

Although in the end we just moved a bunch of bits around on hard drives scattered around the Internet, it was actually a pretty dramatic story. Without getting into too much technical detail, here’s how it all went down.

MMM: “Damn! This website has really slowed down recently. We used to be able to handle up to 900 simultaneous people, but today it seems to be capping at 100. What gives?

Google Search Engine: “Your website is too slow, I think I will lower your rank and stop sending you visitors”

MMM: “Faaack. I think we need to upgrade to a bigger webhost. Let’s try ServInt, since Pat Flynn used it for a while. His recent website crash was probably just a fluke and I’m sure it’s good enough for us, right?”

MMM: “Wow, what a great wife you are! I guess I’ll just go out and do some more fun construction stuff while the weather’s nice”

later that night…

Mrs. MM: “I am TIRED! But I got the whole site transitioned to ServInt. Whew! I’ll just set the DNS servers to switch over and we’ll see how it looks tomorrow morning.

even later that night..

ServInt Web Server: “La-dee-daa, I’m a brand new website running on a nice $600/year VPS server, I can handle lots of traffic.. WHOOM!!!!… ACK!! NOT THAT MUCH TRAFFIC! TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFF!! CRASH!!!.”

Servint Customer Support: “Uh… well, your server had too much traffic, so we had to throttle it. It looks like all legitimate traffic and not a denial-of-service attack, but there’s just like 200 people trying to access your WordPress blog at once. That’s too much for us”

Mrs. MM: OK, so you’re telling me that this service is slower than our Bluehost Pro account that costs less than half as much. I guess I’ll keep shopping around. Buh-bye”

Web Developer Superstar Kevin Worthington:

Mrs and MMM: Hmmm…

At this point, we had to gaze deep into our souls and make a big decision. This blog has been a family-run deal since its inception, and when you bring in an outside developer, you need to hand over your administrative passwords and the feeling of control and safety that you get when you know your fate is in your own hands. But we also knew that in exchange for forking over some trust, you usually get a lot more than you give away. I’ve wanted to get more creative people involved with MMM for a long time, since the potential for growth would be unlimited. A filmmaker making rich little films for the YouTube channel. A bike advocacy flash mob team that makes people start biking all around the world. Co-ops of various sorts where you can build and invent things and help others do the same. A foundation that funds things. The more, the merrier. Anyway, that’s the future. Right now we don’t even have a website.

Mrs and MMM: YEAH! How can we do it?

Kevin: Well, I like the web host called Digital Ocean. It’s super-advanced and speedy, but the configuration is more manual so you need pretty advanced Linux system administrator skills to set it up. But I’ll do it for you. I’m an MMM reader, and we’re just cool like that.

THEN, we can make it even faster, by hooking up a Content Distribution Network in FRONT of the server, so a worldwide network of other servers blasts out the images and other static content based on geographic proximity, which will lessen the load on your main server even further, making the thing crazy, blazing fast.

There is still more neat stuff to come behind the scenes – the CDN mentioned above, plus with Digital Ocean we have the option of seamlessly upgrading our speed every time the site grows to the next level. I’m thrilled to have a real, brilliant, up-to-date tech guy on our side and hope this partnership will blossom over the coming years. He will obviously get a fine place on my Recommendations page. But for now, let us all just bask in the fact that the website works again.

Update: while we’ve got much faster load times in general, there will still be some bumps and brief periods of downtime as the optimization continues. So if you get a delayed load time occasionally or a 404-not found error, just give it a minute and reload.

…

Further Detail: I took down yesterday’s post about the transition-in-process to avoid confusion, but here is a comment Mrs. MM wrote which I didn’t want to lose, since it sums up some of her thoughts on the process:

Hi everyone!

I just wanted to mention a few things and write a quick update.

First, Bluehost has been awesome and I would highly recommend them to anyone starting a blog. It is VERY easy and they do a great job. It is one of the few places where you can install WordPress and get a site going extremely fast. They also have a lot of support and documentation. I have heard that there have been issues in the last week for some, but I’m sure it will be resolved.

Some of the other web hosts we have tried have been much more complicated to use and require more skill (so far we’ve tried AN Web Hosting, ServInt, and now our site is on Digital Ocean!). I would not recommend those other hosts unless you really know what you are doing or if you get a lot of traffic on your site and need more than what bluehost is offering (apparently Bluehost is coming out with more options soon though, so stay tuned).

As for the update, we initially made our move to ServInt this morning and as soon as we went live, the server immediately CRASHED! ServInt informed us that our traffic was too big for them to handle. Huh, that is pretty crazy. So, even Bluehost did better than them in this regard.

I was desperate and even though I always try to do everything myself, I realized it was time to ask for help. So, when @kworthington tweeted that he would be willing to help, I jumped on the chance. You can find him at http://kevinworthington.com/. He knew exactly what to do and got right on it.

He set us up with Digital Ocean (a Linux based server that I would have had no idea how to configure) and got us up and running in no time. Even the forum works! (we’re still working on e-mail, by the way).

From what I’ve seen so far, the site is lightning fast and Kevin has ideas to make it even faster. We could not be happier.

This was a big lesson for me. Sometimes outsourcing is worthwhile when you don’t know what the f*ck you are doing. I was practically up all night working on this and Kevin got it all done in only a couple of hours.

Anyway, thanks for your patience and we’re excited to move forward on our new server!!

Hi Kevin,
Maybe you can write an article on living MMM in (the ridiculously non-MMM greater NYC area). We live in Manhattan. My wife grew up in Long Island and has a large family there. We’re pregnant and gonna move to the Island. I work from home, and am inspired by MMM but wish someone who actually lives in the area would write an article on hacking an MMM-lifestyle in Long Island or Manhattan or San Francisco, etc.

Hmmm… I lived in Manhattan for 8 years. That’s where I mounted my first financial coup and dumped $126K worth of debt in 22 months. It’s totally possible to hack that place, and I made $10’s of thousands in side income. Of course, it is a unique place that is hostile to outsiders and preys on its citizens financially, so I understand why people get overwhelmed. But, the basic principles still apply: you only lose what you put in the game.

If you have the right mentality, NYC is littered with free and cheap. I think people get the wrong idea because it’s POSSIBLE to spend a fortune (mostly for outsiders), but totally not mandatory.

I have a theory that if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere. I mean, it’s up to you.

New York.

New …. wait — what?

If you want, I’ll write said guest post. It’s up to you…. New York, New – oh, nevermind.

@patrick, I have no problems making money in Manhattan. And inspired by MMM i have figured out how to save a lot. Maxing 401k – 51k in 2012 (f/t job 401k max and also set up a 401k for my consulting business and maxed out for both me and my wife). Also, fully contributing to employee stock purchase program, and saving all vested stocks. But expenses are still high. I am now allergic to spending so much on housing, and as a busy high earner with a f/t job I love, a consulting business on the side, and several business plans at different levels of maturity, my issue is no time for the other half of mustachianism, which is self-sufficiency and expense reduction, e.g., DIY. housing costs, renovations, etc., are EXPENSIVE. I did switch to using google voice only for free home phones (via OBI voip converter), and we cut cable tv. big things that save a few thousand bucks, but still only a tiny % of our spend. Maybe we should make a Long Island and/or Manhattan Mustachian forum topic and share tips. I could probably save another 5k in restaurants, and 2-3k in taxis, but I guess what I really want tips on is housing hacks for someone thinking of moving to long island and wanting to also invest in rental houses in long island. anyone have knowledge/expertise there? 3-4 br homes for 350-500k with rental potential of 2400-2800/mo in nassau.

If you keep asking this question, with the goal of avoiding a soul-sucking car commute at the front of your mind, you sometimes get good answers.

For example, one of my best job offers back in 1999 was near San Francisco. Houses started at $600k there even back then. So I considered the other job offers. Found one in Boulder. Houses in town were still $400k, but a house 8 miles out in the next town (still within biking distance) was only in the $200s. Did the math, then took that job instead.

Other tricks include: renting instead of buying. Working from home. Switching jobs. Public transit.

The core philosophy is Constant Optimizing – if you are ever stuck with a car commute, accept it if necessary for a short time.. but spend equal time working to eliminate it. As opposed to most people, who do what a friend of mine just did: moved from 1 mile from work, to 15 miles from work, just so he could buy a nice new custom house that was bigger than his existing perfectly nice 4-bedroom place.

I think what gets lost is that so many people assume that if they’re going to work in finance it has to be in Manhattan, or IT in San Francisco. I was offered a job transfer to either of these locations and declined. We were already being paid industry standard salaries and bonuses (so the move didn’t come with a raise!) and I had no desire to see my net pay cut by 10% or more just because I moved to a locale with an income tax.

Living cheaply in New York City is as easy, fun, and rewarding as any other place in the world. Probably more so.

I’ve been living in the heart of the West Village for thirteen years. People say it’s expensive living here, but I haven’t found it so.

My way of living means maximizing my free time and I haven’t needed to work more than part-time for a decade — my only source of income. I haven’t missed a payment on anything in that time and I don’t know anyone enjoying life more than me. Meanwhile I’ve traveled the world several times over and all sorts of other cool stuff.

@josh & darren…. first thing, “Cities aren’t mustachian or anti-mustachian. People are.” is a 100% true. We lived on the UWS of Manhattan after paying down a shit-ton of debt. If you’ve got some cash, you’ve got a good bargaining position on rents, especially if you’ve got good credit. It’s totally possible to live a great lifestyle without spending a lot of money.

Would love to write a hacker’s guide with a Mustachian bend to LI and/or Manhattan with you. That sounds really fun to me. I’m on the forum, but haven’t been active for a couple of weeks. Ironically, I’m balls to the wall working on a mapping app that connects events with people in real time. It fits with the idea that great stuff doesn’t have to cost a lot of money.

That is strange, as I’ve been all over the site, editing posts and trying the “Random” button and seen nothing but speed. I wonder if there could be any slowness remaining due to things like stale data sitting in various browser and DNS caches for the next while? There was definitely some random behavior as my computer and ISP figured out where the new MMM site was earlier this afternoon.

This is why I am so happy about the idea of building up a team. In the forum, I notice Arebelspy and Grant and the other forum moderators moderating and writing like crazy, and that community has grown to kick ass as a result. The readers take care of promotion by sharing posts with their friends. Everyone reads, evaluates and comments around the clock. I occasionally type some shit into the computer as well. It is like a grand symphony!

Much like passive income itself, where your Monetary Employees work for you and crank out additional cash even as you sleep. It is very good to get good stuff happening in Automatic Mode.

For anyone seeing an IP address in the location bar of their browser: your DNS has not yet updated and that IP is the result of being redirected from the old site on Bluehost. Things are getting better slowly, but within the next 24-48 hours, everyone’s DNS should point to the new server. Thanks for your patience!

I was about to ask about something similar. It seems to be working OK in Chrome (which I am using now), but IE9 is not behaving AT ALL. Even after adding mmm to compatibility list. Keeps resolving to IP, half the pictures don’t load, and none of the links work. I am an IE kinda girl, so I hope the DNS updates soon. Patiently waiting… :-)

Hi, The first load of the new website took a count of 14. I’ve done it twice since and a count of 4-5. I never timed it before so I don’t know if its changed. I’m in the UK so probably not looking at your peak load times but I never noticed that it was slow.
I’m using Firefox and all the formatting looks godd to me. Thanks for the site!

Not sure if it’s just me, but I’ve been trying the “Random Article” button recently and it only seems to give me:
“Weekend Edition: Why are you Writing this Blog, Anyway?”
or
“Why are you named, “Mr. Money Mustache”, anyway?”.

Wow, congrats on getting it all working. I am just astounded at the awesome, intelligent people out there who are willing to help you out with any technical problem just because they are nice people. It really makes you feel good about humanity sometimes… Things might just work out.

Definitely no hard cap that I have found – the biggest day of this blog so far was almost 60,000 page views on the main blog plus a similar amount on the Forum with up to 900 simultaneous at times – all with plain old Bluehost!

But I think when you have consistent, fairly high traffic (say over 30,000 per day), you start to notice slowdowns when the shared server running your website is also busy doing other stuff. Many blogs or websites would not notice this, but I make it worse for myself by insisting on a lot of image files and comments all on one page so nobody has to click “next”. Plus running the forum on the same server.

So, I still have no complaints about Bluehost. I’m glad we used them for the majority of this site’s life when it generated very little money, thus it required a nearly-free web host to avoid being cashflow negative. Actually, Digital Ocean is still equally affordable. But I have seen dedicated/VPS web hosts that charge $250-$1000/month to handle traffic at this level. With a bit more earnings coming in nowadays, the site can afford to pay what it needs to, to stay fast. But for starting out, as with any business or hobby, you need to keep costs low.

All nice problems to have when you’re trying to build your site and spread your philosophy, though I’m sure it’s still a huge relief to have everything up and running quickly again.
Getting experts involved can definitely make matters easier sometimes!

MMM – people will wait 3-4 seconds if there is value in your posts – and there sure is! That $76K you calculated is worth spending indeed. Also in the larger scheme of things, you need to be relaxed and not so restless to understand and implement the MMM way of life ! Thanks!

I’ve been reading MMM for a month or so and initially, I had no problems loading the site. Over the past couple weeks, though, it was really dragging. It’s really great seeing this improvement go live and I am very happy to have found this place with so many like-minded people! Thanks much!

I found your website about 2 weeks ago just right before you have these crazy traffic drama.
And guess what? I read ALL the posts since then and almost finishing when I was reading jlcollinsnh’s stock series…and the site crashed! I was almost done too! LOL! Well I read jlcollinsnh’s series after that off and on…just waiting for you guys to come back on!
I was a little irritated when the site didn’t load(it was slow but it always loaded) when I was trying to get the list of books to read that MMM and readers were recommending… because I was going to the LIBRARY!!
Great site by the way! Happy that it’s on a new server.

I’ve been clicking around the site this morning and this is the fastest I can remember it ever being. Thanks for spending the time to put everything up on the new severs. I know that moment of panic when you click you site and nothing comes up; that feeling sucks. Good luck and keep up the great posts.

I happened to think that it’d be nice to have a t-shirt that says “mustachian” on the back while I ride my bike to the post office. I was thinking black with yellow text (not that I’m picky or anything). Is the word “mustachian” a trademark or anything? If it isn’t, you may want to start thinking along those lines. Not for profit but to maintain control.

It’s cool that it’s faster, but it doesn’t look remotely similar in my browser (everything stacked on each other – no sidebar or footer). In the end, though, I’m here for the content, which I can see just fine.

However, I the DNS just propogated to my area now (Philadelphia/Verizon Fios), but I still see some wonkiness. It looks like the CSS is not being downloaded. I assume this is still related to DNS propagation?

There are a few minor things to work on, but I’m confident that everything will be Awesome soon for everyone. It sounds like many folks are not seeing the same things. For example, my site looks great on all browsers. I see a couple of issues, but we are back to serving 200 simultaneous active visitors on the site, which I haven’t seen in a while, so I’m very pleased.

Hang in there – it will all get sorted out. Kevin is looking at everything and is doing a great job. All will be well soon!

Thanks for your patience and for this great community. We love you guys. :)

I like the idea of outsourcing when it can teach you something.The first time I had windows replaced in a house, I hired a window company to do it. Turned out it was a very simple procedure, so I did all subsequent replacements myself. First time building a house, I hired a sagely old builder to supervise me. Next time, I got the general contractor license and was the builder myself.

With this web server migration, we have a guy with years of practice in speed optimization and an interest in doing it. We’ve already learned loads from him. Plus, the cost savings and income potential is very large from having a better website.

On the other hand, outsourcing your lawnmowing is just an excuse to not do a 30 minute walk in the yard you’re paying so much to own anyway.

Funny…the only time I’ve EVER received those “ERROR ESTABLISHING A DATABASE CONNECTION” and other messages has been in the last week or so…including just now. Took 4 or 5 refreshes to get the darn site to pop up.

On a web development perspective you may want to reduce your HTTP requests to javascript, css and image files.

This page has 41 external Javascript scripts. Try combining them into one.
This page has 17 external stylesheets. Try combining them into one.
This page has 21 external background images. Try combining them with CSS sprites.

Putting JavaScripts at the bottom of the page will also help the page load – javascript causing errors or big file can block/slow down the HTML tags from loading.

Good job on the migration Kevin! I’ve tried to set up a Linux server and it certainly is a specialty! (I gave up.. that time.. there will be more attempts I’m sure!) And now I know a reliable company for websites with high traffic from this article.. here’s hoping I have this “problem” in the near future ;)

Love your blog and I’m glad everything is working well. Now if something can be done about the small, hard to read font, life will be good. Surely I can’t be the only one who thinks the font is too small and hard to read?

Hmm.. I’ve heard that once before. To adjust the size of fonts your browser displays, try holding down CTRL, then either rolling the mouse wheel or pressing ‘+’ or ‘-‘. I do this all the time, to adjust site fonts up or down all around the web (right now I work on a laptop that has a 13″ screen with 1920×1080 pixel resolution, which means some fonts are too tiny even for my read-entire-novels-on-an-iPhone screen tastes)

Or if you’re particular, as I am, almost everthing about the way a page displays can be controlled by the user. Just check the options in the browser preferences, look for something like “prefer user style sheet”, and tinker.

I much prefer white text on black background (white backgrounds give me a headache), in a moderately large font, and that’s what I’m seeing now.

There was a nytimes article a while ago about a cyberattack on the nytimes itself. The article stated in a quite factual way how a big cyber-security company called Mandiant had helped the times get back on its feet. I like thinking of how Mandiant almost certainly saw more business because they helped the right organization and I like thinking about how Kevin may see an uptick for helping out MMM.

May I also suggest Cloudflare? It’s a trivial-to-set-up CDN and we’re successfully using it on a website that gets around 3000 unique visitors/day (500K pageviews/week). It also has built-in threat control, on-the-fly JS/CSS minification and other neat features.

And did I say it was dirt cheap? In fact, we’re happy with it’s FREE version – we’re not even buying the advanced stuff.

The biggest improvement we’ve made is having someone on our side who cares about the site, knows what he is doing, and can make improvements quickly and figure stuff out. We’ve been having database issues for a long time, so we’re working through all this stuff with a smart person who has done it all before. We’re already doing great and it will just keep getting better.

MMM’s website probably needs the full CDN support with all their visitors. CloudFlare isn’t a CDN in the traditional sense. Visitors will go to CloudFlare servers for the pages of your site rather than hitting your server. It acts like a proxy server for regular HTML pages.

I thought that Cloudflare had it’s own CDN which automatically caches your static content. It’s main benefit is that you don’t need to modify ANYTHING in your site code. Since it’s a proxy, it does all the magic on-the-fly.

But anyway, if they already have a CDN, then this is irrelevant. :) Good luck! :)

Well.. servers are farther away from my knowledge set! Its only what I picked up when doing research. Maybe Kevin could explain the details if he’s interested.

I actually use CloudFlare with all my websites. So I do love them. But when I tested MaxCDN with my website I found it faster than CloudFlare. CloudFlare has also gone down on me a few times too. But CloudFlare was free and MaxCDN was not, so I moved back.

Have you considered doing away with Wordpress, at least for the blog? Specifically, I have in mind tools like http://octopress.org/ (there are others I’m sure).

This one in particular is free, generates a set of static files that you can then upload to whatever server you wish via ftp/scp/git … Since it’s static content, a very modest machine can easily serve 10k concurrent accesses without breaking a sweat. If you choose to use a CDN on top of that, there is virtually no chance of your server ever becoming overloaded. This would bring the cost of hosting down significantly, I believe (It would however not take care of the forums)

There’s apparently a CDN built into Wordpress now that you can activate with a plug-in called Jetpack. The CDN is called Photon. I haven’t used it yet, but I’m told it’s just press a button and go. (Yeah right. This is technology here!)

Kevin sounds like he’s on the case, anyway. Who wouldn’t want a Kevin! :)

Have you considered Amazon Cloud as a host? It’s a bit unorthodox but seems much cheaper than traditional hosting. I buy a micro instance and some disk and traffic, and I get a virtual server with root and all, for the price of the cheap shared hosting.

I have no idea what any of you are talking about, but I can change my oil, cut my grass and save a life after biking to and from the grocery store. Long live
Badassity! And here I thought that the load times were related to the Mustashian ideals of patience and delayed gratification – that or my circa 2006 Win XP free laptop. Thanks for the updates.

Think of your server as your house and your web site performance as your standard of living. Typically when you are running on a shared server, you are in a big house (a mansion!) but you are sharing it with a lot of roommates. Even worse is that you don’t get to pick these roommates. Anyone with the money is allowed to move in, space allowing. At times, your roommates might be great, tidy and respectful other. At other times they may be disrespectful slobs. Though your house is big, your standard of living goes up and down depending on who your roommates are.

In server terms, your roommates compete with you on resources. Imagine if Microsoft decided to save money on hosting and attempted to move their site to your Bluehost server. If they did that then nobody’s site on that server would load! Additionally, your roommates may be mad scientist in training programmers who run experiments which occasionally blow up, or they could get hacked and their site turns into a monster which uses a lot of resources to do evil deeds (like sending out tons of spam.)

To get total control over your standard of living, you need to move into your own house. Unfortunately, you are getting less for more. You probably can’t afford a mansion and it’s probably more than you need anyways. But it still feels strange that you would be paying more money in monthly costs in moving from a shared mansion to your own two bedroom house. However, in some cases a two bedroom house might not be enough. You may have to go for a three or four bedroom house, which is even more expensive (and still far from being a mansion!)

With a VPS you are still sharing the same system, but most of the resources are completely walled off (the big exception is that the drives are still common space, but shared drives generally cause less problems than shared everything.) Your neighbors can throw all the wild parties they want, but they won’t affect your space. Generally the entry level VPS accounts are for small sites or development. For you to have had access to the resources you had when you were on Bluehost, you probably would have needed to jump up a couple of plans (which probably would have cost nearly twice as much.)

When comparing the price to Digital Ocean, you have to break down what you get between the two services. With Servint, you probably picked up a managed account. That means you were paying probably around $20 / month for a Cpanel / Plesk license which gives you the control panel. A reasonable monthly charge for their base account (comparable to what you would find with most VPS hosts is $20 – $30 / month, especially considering that they actually offer support for just about any silly request you might have (a super cheap host offers nearly no support other than to verify the thing is plugged in and the lights are blinking.)

So, in this case you basically offloaded your support costs from the host to a freelancer. That may or may not save you money and headaches. The great thing about hosting support is that you can generally get a rep 24 / 7. A freelancer actually sleeps, takes vacations and works on other jobs. Servint probably would have even moved your site from Bluehost if you asked them to. I know they offer this, but I don’t know if they would have charged extra or if they would have included it as part of their support. I imagine if you would have done a bit of negotiation, then it would have been included.

What’s interesting about Digital Ocean is their SSD storage. SSD’s are far faster than spinning disks for moving data from storage to eyeballs. It’s a bit of a wildcard for hosting these days because storage access speeds (or I/O) is one of the bottlenecks for popular Wordpress driven sites but everyone is waiting for SSD prices to go down. MySQL (the database) access hits that storage hard because it has to put together bunches of queries (each hitting the disk separately) as opposed to loading one static HTML file (this is where caching can really help.) So, really it’s the database software which is the bottleneck, but fast hard drives go a long ways in removing that bottleneck.

Unfortunately, Digital Ocean is probably running consumer grade SSD’s to get those prices that low. That means their servers are probably running the same sort of drives which might come with an SSD laptop, a device which is built more for low prices than durability and not designed for a web site which may be expected to put heavy load on the device 24 / 7 rather than a couple hours / day of browsing / saving cat pictures. However, that’s not to say that consumer grade SSD’s can’t be used in a server environment. Some providers, such as Linode, refuses to offer SSD storage until enterprise grade SSD’s are more cost effective. I hope that Digital Ocean has a robust enough plan in place that its customers won’t have to experience data loss from drive failure and / or performance degradation.

If we are further comparing Digital Ocean with Linode, then we would also have to look at the CPU resources they give us. The initial plans at Digital Ocean provide access to 1 core while all Linode plans start at 8 cores. That means if your site is heavy on CPU usage, then you need to take more than just the SSD’s into account.

Ultimately, choice is good. Hosting is a tool and choices allow us to pick the right tool for the job. But if you are making comparisons, then you need to make sure that you aren’t comparing apples to oranges. By the way, I have accounts with Digital Ocean and so far so good!

I wish there was a common benchmark for server performance that would be clearly listed on all hosting accounts – so you could know before signing up. Maybe even a Wordpress-specific one, where a specific test blog would be loaded and run in controlled conditions. Then I could see that Bluehost guaranteed a minimum/median/max performance of 10/100/500 operations/second, and a new potential host might have a guaranteed 200, or 1000, or whatever. It is good to know what you’re paying for.

I see you are using nginx now – much more resilient to load peaks than apache…. Presumably you are caching it as well so service should be instant!

The .css glitches mentioned may be due to reading from the cache – just clear it manually if you modify things (ie erase the files and they will regenerate).. I don’t use WP caching but the nginx cache which I find more reliable. It just needs a must-use plugin to clear the cache when a comment is added or you are logged in. I have a number of sites on my server so that way I don’t have to worry about individual caches.

There are some nginx perl scripts to minify and combine things which are better handled server wide than by WordPress itself. Haven;t tried these yet though….

Anyone having trouble with the forums today? When I went to log on today, it actually logged me on to another user’s account. When I clicked “log out”, a different user’s account came up. I kept clicking “log out” and was cycled through several user’s account (none of which were mine).

I’m not sure how to remedy this and am a bit concerned that someone may have access to my account. Could someone let me know if there’s something I should be doing to fix this? I would post this issue to the forums but didn’t to post under someone else’s username/account.

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welcome new readers

Take a look around. If you think you are hardcore enough to handle Maximum Mustache, feel free to start at the first article and read your way up to the present using the links at the bottom of each article.

For more casual sampling, have a look at this complete list of all posts since the beginning of time. Go ahead and click on any titles that intrigue you, and I hope to see you around here more often.